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The hardest part of Mike Loyd’s construction project with the Ponte Vedra football program is complete.

In the span of one graduating class, Loyd guided the Sharks from a team without seniors — and without much chance to be competitive — to a team that won a district championship and kept playing into basketball season.

Now the question is: Can they keep it up?

Loyd will be greatly disappointed it they can’t.

“It’s nice to have expectations; it’s nice to be defending something,” Loyd said. “It should make you work harder. We’ve got to learn how to handle success.”

This year’s group would like to do more than handle it. They’re looking to top what the 2011 squad did in winning a pair of playoff games.

“We’re all thinking about getting back to where we were last year or farther,” senior linebacker Greg Tronti said. “We’re ready to go. There’s no reason we can‘t go to the third round of the playoffs if not all the way to the state championship.”

Defenses surely won’t have much fun dealing with star running back Cole Mazza for another season.

The 230-pound senior is coming off a year in which he ran for 1,730 yards and 27 touchdowns. Should he approach those kinds of numbers again, it will hard keeping the Sharks from another long postseason run.

This year, every Ponte Vedra opponent will stack its defense in order to try to contain Mazza.

A great deal of the team’s success will depend on what the Sharks do with those situations.

“There are going to be some games where somebody else is going to have to step up,” Loyd said.

Last year, senior quarterback Perry Orth and senior wide receiver Jake Jacob made a lot of teams pay for going all out to stop the run.

There will be some new faces trying to replicate that this season.

Senior Eric Smith would love to slip right into Jacob’s role this year. He said there’s no reason the Sharks can’t be a balanced offensive team again.

“We can do the same thing as last year,” Smith said. “We have wide receivers who can make plays.”

Getting the ball out to those receivers will be Matt Deegan or Corey Love. Loyd said he isn’t opposed to playing both guys — at least until one clearly separates himself from the other. Love played in the spring game, but Deegan was still with the baseball team and missed spring practice.

“They both bring different things to the table,” Loyd said. “I feel like we have two kids we can win with.”

While the offense gets the lion’s share of the attention, Loyd is quietly confident in his defense. He pointed to the way the defense kept the Sharks in contention against Wakulla — even with the way the offense struggled to run the ball.

Ponte Vedra has some very experienced defensive linemen in seniors Tyler Davidson, Matt Mauro and Nick Singleton. Tronti and juniors Dillon Bates and Alex Awad form a solid linebacker group with depth behind them.

In the defensive backfield, Loyd said he’ll miss hard-hitting safety Joey Carzoli. But he also has confidence in defensive backs Dalton Lemaster, Anthony Noto and Nick Demasi, among others.

So Loyd and the Sharks head into the school’s fifth season with every reason to think it will be as good as the last one. They won’t be making excuses if it’s not.

“That’s why you play; that’s why you work so hard,” Loyd said. “You want to be playing for something. We’ve had to work to get here.”